AMSTERDAM — At 53, Alex Winter has worn many hats in the entertainment industry, moving from the stage to screen and then finally behind the camera, helming indie oddities such as “Freaked” in 1993 and “Fever” in 1999. Latterly, however, he has proven himself a capable hand with non-fiction, and he arrived at IDFA with his third feature-length doc “The Panama Papers”, following the film’s world premiere at The Hamptons Intl. Film Festival in October.

Shot on an almost as-it-happened basis by Winter and his team, the action starts in 2016, when a (still) anonymous whistle-blower codenamed “John Doe”, voiced in the film by Elijah Wood, contacted German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung with a cache of information relating to financial irregularities involving Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. From there, we see how Doe’s tip-off became a huge global scandal, as the ICIJ – the International Consortium of Investigative